Progress ~ LUNAR: No promises, but...LUNAR Walking School# Posted on November 30th, 2009 02:44 AM by Gideon ZhiNo promises, but if I can manage to edit even one chapter each day this week, LUNAR: Walking School might just be available by the weekend. I finished editing Chapter 7 (of 12) today, and as a bonus plowed through 8. Four left...

Progress ~ Holy Umbrella enters beta testing.Holy Umbrella: Dondera´s Wild!!# Posted on October 29th, 2009 02:40 PM by Gideon ZhiBetatesting on Holy Umbrella started last night. Should be a pretty quick deal, all told; the game is not very long and is a *lot* more stable than Mystic Ark was. It DOES have a lot of text, though! A surprising amount of text.

I´ve completely replaced the snapshot gallery with up-to-date material - 22 brand new screenshots, two of which you can see here.

Release ~ Mystic Ark v1.01Mystic Ark# Posted on September 26th, 2009 06:37 AM by Gideon ZhiThis is a small (big) fix for a small (big) bug which caused random battles to stop completely just before fighting the last boss in world 3. I´m looking for a code to manually re-enable them, but in the meantime a patch which fixes the bug is up.

The nutjobs who programmed this crap need to be beaten with a tire iron. For those who are interested, the bug was caused by an extremely unlikely combination of factors, including (1) the location of one particular string in the rom, and (2) the particular method by which the string was accessed. The simple probability of any string starting at this address is one in 65535...

Major Release ~ Mystic Ark´s out.Mystic Ark# Posted on September 22nd, 2009 07:33 AM by Gideon ZhiAfter ten days of extreme beta testing and ten more(ish) of extreme midnight oil burning, Mystic Ark is finally available for public consumption. Do please be sure to read the readme, as it contains several notes about the translation itself.

Progress ~ Mystic Ark Beta Test Progressing SmoothlyMystic Ark# Posted on September 16th, 2009 12:03 PM by Gideon ZhiMystic Ark entered playtesting on Sunday afternoon, and the tests have been progressing smoothly. We´ve been moving at a quick pace (but are not sacrificing accuracy for speed) and are up to the fifth world on our initial playthrough. Second playthrough should go pretty quickly, faster than the initial one anyway. I´ve replaced the old screenshots on the project´s page with 28 new ones showcasing the current work on the game.

Progress ~ Moving Forward (Mystic Ark, etc)Mystic Ark# Posted on September 11th, 2009 12:04 PM by Gideon ZhiSo, since Dynamic Designs posted an update on their Mystic Ark project, I figured I should post an update on mine. As of about 5AM on Thursday, the script has been completely inserted. It´s not entirely stable; I was able to play for about ten minutes last night before encountering a bug on the Bloodhook which wouldn´t let me leave an item shop, but that´s since been fixed. Due to the way the script is stored there are probably a lot of these minor little instabilities, all of which are easily fixed provided they´re found in the first place. A fully proportional font has been implemented, as you can see in the screenshots below; in the event that the text needs to be centered, a command for that has been programmed as well. Further, a linebreak command has been added not only to menus but also to equipment displays, and it works better than I could have hoped. I´m writing this from work so I don´t have a lot of time, but over the next few days (Monday, probably) I´ll be updating the project page with completely new snapshots.

I´m also resolving to work on several games in order, as they´re all fairly close to being done and pretty much require either further editing or minor hacking tasks. After Mystic Ark these are, in order, Holy Umbrella, LUNAR: Walking School, Megami Tensei, and Laplace´s Demon. I may squeeze Hourai High in there somewhere, get the script ready for satsu to do the extra editing he wanted. But that´s what my schedule looks like, at least for now.

Progress ~ At long last, an updateHoly Umbrella: Dondera´s Wild!!, # Posted on July 27th, 2009 11:08 PM by Gideon ZhiBefore I launch into the update proper, let me first express regret at the silence on the front page lately. Marathonning Alpha Gaiden like I did was taxing and tiring, and my state of exhaustion is/was not helped by a rigorous work schedule; I do 38 hours over three days, and by the time I come home after that I barely have the energy to do ANYTHING. I´m lucky if I get that energy back by 9PM the night before I have to go back to work. That said, in the last several weeks (not to mention the last several months) I´ve made quite a lot of progress on several of my projects.

To begin with, I´ve reinserted the majority of Holy Umbrella´s text, and it´s gone through an initial alpha test phase. There are still several issues and a couple of untranslated text boxes, but nothing that a few days hopefully won´t fix. See the first of the accompanying screenshots for an example of inserted text.

Similarly, some fairly major strides have been made in Majin Tensei recently. The last of the technical issues surrounding font replacement have finally been resolved, and some theoretical assembly workarounds for text expansion that I´d been thinking about have proven to operate flawlessly in practice. The result is that, at least for now, I can insert roughly 3/4s of the "main" script with no issue, and that the rest shouldn´t be far behind. Meanwhile the demon dialogue has been fully dumped and translated, and is ready for insertion as well, but I want to get the rest of the text into the game before I futz with that any further. Again, see the other accompanying screenshot for a sample of inserted text actually working correctly in-game.

I´m not sure if it´s been mentioned on the front page or not, but Romancing SaGa 2´s script has finally been translated, thanks to Eien ni Hen, translatress extraordinaire. I´ve outsourced script formatting to local forum and IRC junkie Arle, who has already completed a good chunk of the work. Screenshots will be posted as soon as they´re available, but I have no idea how long that´ll be.

The last game I´m going to mention in detail is LUNAR Walking School. As I´m sure I´ve probably mentioned before, the entire game has been hacked and translated, and has been "sort of" ready to go for a while; however, I´d wanted to give its script another going-over before releasing it. Well, I´ve gone through the first of the main plot arcs and done all the edits I´ve wanted. This, if I recall correctly, comprises chapters 1-7, or about half the game. It takes about three to four hours to edit a chapter, so call it fifteen to twenty hours of hard work on my part before this is ready to go. That said, I can only work on one thing at a time, and there are a lot of other things vying for my hours, so don´t expect LUNAR immediately.

All that said, I´d like to remind everyone, myself included, of the loooooooong list of games with translated scripts that are also vying for my time. These are all in varying states of completion, so remember, just because the script is translated doesn´t mean that the game is anywhere near ready for release. So, without further ado, the list, excluding the four games mentioned above: Adventures of Hourai High, Ancient Magic, Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem, Ganbare Goemon 2, Ladystalker, Lagrange Point, Laplace´s Demon, Madara 2, Makaitoushi SaGa, Megami Tensei, Mystic Ark, Rejoice, Slime Morimori Dragon Quest, Solid Runner, Super Puzzle Puyo 2, Super Robot Wars 4, Super Robot Wars EX, Super Robot Wars Gaiden, Tactics Ogre, and Ys 5. I have not forgotten about ANY of these. It´s a question of time and motivation, both of which have been at an unfortunate premium these days.

Hopefully I´ll have a release coming in the next few weeks, but I´m not going to make any promises. Again, sorry for the silence. I´ve just been extremely tired of late.

Release ~ Merry Christmas - SRW Alpha GaidenSuper Robot Wars Alpha Gaiden# Posted on December 26th, 2008 02:03 AM by Gideon ZhiYep. There´s not much else to say at this point, other than that this is a basically untested beta patch. Also, I´m really sorry for taking so long with this. Because it´s basically an untested beta patch, we ran into some crippling last-minute issues, first with the patch not properly replacing the game´s executable and thus leaving the asm hacks out of the resultant disc image, and second with the Premium Box version of the game just not working at all. Both issues have hopefully been resolved! Note that the patch was developed based on the original release of the game, so patching the Premium Box release has been tested even LESS. But it should work, fingers crossed.

Huge, huge thanks out to Excellen (Chrissy on some boards, Hokuto on others) for her extra-hard work over the last four years translating this game´s mammoth 3+ megabyte script. Thanks also to SilverSonic, whose initial (sadly failed) attempts at translating the script got the project on its feet in the first place! Thanks as well to everyone else mentioned in the readme who contributed to the project, and to Masaki and Iriliane from our IRC channel for performing some last-minute grunt testing on the Premium Box version of the game.